A five-star customer experience is a point of distinction and a competitive edge that's difficult for competitors to replicate. To improve the customer experience, one must first understand it. How is this done?

While other Europeans retreated from the Brexit nation, my family ended up moving upstream to Boris Johnson's hometown of London. It's necessary to visit Finland regularly, and unfortunately, this often means flying. The aviation industry provides a good example of the importance of customer experience.

A return flight from Helsinki to London can cost between 50 and 350 euros. A Ryanair flight takes two hours and fifty minutes. A Finnair flight takes two hours and fifty minutes. Both flights use similar aircraft, the seats are equally uncomfortable, and the in-flight service is minimal in both. 

I use both airlines, depending slightly on the situation, yet Finnair always initially seems more appealing. How is it possible for two companies offering the same product to compete on entirely different pricing?

The Importance of Customer Experience

It all starts with buying the flight – where Finnair's online shop is clear and straightforward, Ryanair's service is a digital maze where the customer constantly lives in apprehensive uncertainty about what additional services must be added to the order. The initially cheap price easily doubles by the time you're at the checkout entering your credit card number. By now, you're already feeling conned.

At Stansted during peak hours, check-in and boarding resemble a 1990s efficient barn, where thousands of dairy cows wind in their stalls for hours to reach the point of separating their fluids into zip-lock bags. If you survive to the gate, a “Ryanair special” awaits: Passengers are herded into a cramped tunnel leading to the aircraft well in advance – usually even before the plane has landed. Instead of sitting on terminal benches, passengers spend an uncomfortable 45 minutes leaning against the walls in a musty tube.

The biggest difference in Finnair’s and Ryanair’s products is the customer experience. A good customer experience can be a distinguishing factor, a competitive advantage, and a sufficient reason to charge a tenfold price.

Improve the Customer Experience, but First Understand It

To enhance the customer experience, one must first understand it. Two good ways to approach structuring experiences are: 

1. Identifying User Groups:

   Primary user groups are formed by finding common denominators in people's behaviour, backgrounds, and needs within the customer mass.

2. Investigating the Customer Journey:

   The customer journey is a method often used in service design to describe the customer's touchpoints during the service selection, acquisition, and usage. In its simplest form, a customer journey might include the stages of search, consideration, purchase, and service use, but especially in the purchase and use phases, the division can also be more detailed.

After Understanding, Focus on Customer Experience Details

Once the different customers' touchpoints and journey through the service are understood, the design and development can be better targeted, and development areas can be assessed more accurately. 

Utilise Analytics. With analytics and heatmaps, one can quantitatively (quantitatively) track how customers behave on an online service – what content is most consumed, what functions are used, and what routes are taken through the service. A/B testing allows testing of two or more solutions to determine which leads to the desired outcome best. Analytical tools are generally passive, suitable for handling large amounts of data, and susceptible to incorrect interpretation of results. 

Interview Your Customers. An active approach to the customer experience is achieved by directly asking for customers' opinions. Customer interviews can map genuine needs, purchasing barriers, or concerns about service usability. 

Test the Usability of Your Service. Another too infrequently utilised tool is usability testing. The purpose of usability testing is to gather information about the actual user experience of the service. For the test, a functional prototype of the service or product is created and its functionality evaluated by observing real customers' behaviour.

Compare Customer Experiences. It is also good to compare the customer experience of your service with other operators in the same industry. Two mysterious acronyms, NPS and CES, provide a solution to this. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures a customer's likelihood to recommend and satisfaction with a single simple question: “How likely are you to recommend this service/product to a friend or colleague?” The customer answers on a scale from zero to ten, where zero means very unlikely to recommend and ten means very likely to recommend. The NPS value is calculated from the responses as follows:

• Those giving a score of 0-6 are the company’s detractors.

• Those giving a score of 7-8 are passive.

• Those giving a score of 9-10 are promoters.

The NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Passive respondents do not influence the result.

Customer Effort Score (CES) assesses how easy it is for customers to deal with your company, essentially how much “effort” it requires. CES provides a more detailed measure than NPS as to how smooth the transaction is perceived. Customers are asked: “How easy was it to do business with us?”, and they rate on a scale from 1 to 7. One means “very difficult” and seven means “very easy.” The CES value is obtained by adding all responses together and dividing by the number of responses, which is simply the average of the responses.

The Increasingly Popular As a Service – You Pay for Use of the Service but Don’t Own It

Netflix, Spotify, Wolt, Uber, Amazon – numerous successful consumer brands of the 2000s sell not products but services. The “As a Service” ideology is slowly but surely spreading to traditional business areas as well. 

A good example is the transition of transport and car sales to the MaaS model (Mobility as a Service), which still awaits its major breakthrough. A key difference in service sales is the importance of customer experience and customer service. 

In the service-focused world of the future, every company must understand that a good experience leads to commercial success.

1. A good experience is more likely to lead to a sale – conversion improves.

2. A satisfied customer is likely to purchase more products at once – the average purchase increases.

3. Good experiences are something people want to share with friends – recommendations grow the customer base.

4. Comfortable shopping leads to repeated visits – return customers are the best customers.

5. A satisfied customer does not complain or return products – customer service is not overloaded and more products are sold.

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